For those not near a TV who want to see Nancy Pelosi retake the gavel as the Speaker of the House, here’s the live feed:
Live Feed: Opening of the 116th CongressPost + Comments (392)
by Adam L Silverman| 392 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2018, Foreign Affairs, I'm With Her, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America
For those not near a TV who want to see Nancy Pelosi retake the gavel as the Speaker of the House, here’s the live feed:
Live Feed: Opening of the 116th CongressPost + Comments (392)
by David Anderson| 37 Comments
This post is in: A Woman's Place Is In The House, Anderson On Health Insurance, Because of wow., Election 2018, NANCY SMASH!, Open Threads
The 116th Congress is currently being sworn in.
The gavel is being handed over.
The Blue Wave arrived.
Open thread
Image of one of the Healthcare Gavels from Napa Valley Register
by $8 blue check mistermix| 113 Comments
This post is in: The Dirty F-ing Hippies Were Right
There was some discussion of PAYGO and its controversial presence in the Democrat’s rules package in yesterday’s comments, so I thought you might be interested in Jim Newell’s latest:
With all but one Republican expected to vote against the rules package, Democrats can afford only 19 defections on the floor. Khanna and Ocasio-Cortez’s opposition seemed to signal a potential flood of defections that could force a last-minute rewrite. But neither Khanna nor the Progressive Caucus were actively whipping against the rules package Wednesday, and few others seemed willing to publicly threaten votes against it. Progressive Caucus Co-Chair Mark Pocan, meanwhile, tweeted that he had gotten assurances from Democratic leaders that the new PAYGO rule “will not be an impediment to advancing key progressive priorities in the 116th Congress.” In other words: He had gotten assurances that the rule, when inconvenient, would just be waived by a simple majority vote in the House.
That gets to a bigger point that Pocan also makes in his tweets: The real pay-go problem for progressives is the pay-go law that Congress passed in 2010, not the House’s pay-go rule, which comes and goes and gets waived or circumvented over and over.
The Republicans regularly voted to waive the PAYGO law when voting through their tax cut agenda, but of course as soon as Democrats are in charge in the House, the Senate will have a change of heart. That’s why it’s smart politics to be against PAYGO – it’s just another leverage point that Republicans will use when they want to thwart the Democratic legislative agenda. Democrats used PAYGO to run a surplus in the 90’s and it got us nowhere politically. We don’t need to do that again.
Also, as a New Yorker as well as a Democrat, I’m happy that AOC is out making noise about this. She’s from a solid D district and she should act that way. There’s a double standard in the media on “disloyalty”. When you’re a purple district Democrat you can run to every TV camera in town and bleat about legislation you’re opposing because it’s “too liberal”, and nary a tweet is tweeted about how that’s backstabbing Pelosi. Yet when a deep blue district Democrat opposes a piece of legislation that’s not liberal enough, he or she endures a tinkle shower of tweets telling him or her to STFU and get back in their lane. I hope that AOC’s example of how they can be primaried from the left will encourage a few other safe seat New York reps (*cough* Brian Higgins *cough*) to be out and proud.
This post is in: A Woman's Place Is In The House, Don't Agonize - Organize, NANCY SMASH!, Open Threads, Proud to Be A Democrat, Republicans in Disarray!
Nancy Pelosi: "Tomorrow we will bring to the floor legislation that will open up government. It will be based on actions taken by the Republican Senate … led by Senator Mitch McConnell." Via ABC. pic.twitter.com/WSzXBAZ6Xy
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 2, 2019
Also, unlike Paul Ryan quickly discovering his best move was to hide while Trump sucked up all the media oxygen, Pelosi has no motivation to do likewise.
— Schooley (@Rschooley) January 3, 2019
E.J. Dionne, in the Washington Post, “Nancy Pelosi vows that House Democrats won’t act like Republicans”:
Incoming speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to be clear about what the new Democratic House majority will not be: They will not, she insists, act like the Republicans.
“We believe that we will not become them,” she said in a New Year’s Day phone interview during a visit to her native Baltimore. “We’re not going to do to them what they did to President Obama. . . . It’s really important for us not to become them and certainly not to become like the president of the United States in terms of how he speaks without any basis of fact, evidence, data or truth…”
Pelosi also pushed back hard against the idea that, in holding Trump and his administration accountable, Democrats would be engaging in some sort of investigative orgy. On the contrary, she said, Article I of the Constitution grants Congress responsibility for “oversight over the agencies of government.”
She added pointedly: “We don’t want the administration describing the traditional congressional responsibility for oversight to be labeled ‘investigation.’ There may be some investigations that spring from another purpose, but we will be strategic and not political when it comes to that.” She senses no need to explain or elaborate on the meaning of the words “another purpose,” even though they represent a potentially mortal threat to Trump’s presidency…
Thursday Morning Open Thread: Cheering for PelosiPost + Comments (132)
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance, Free Markets Solve Everything
Earlier this year, I was talking with a very astute healthy policy observer. They pointed out that the Trump Administration’s push towards much wider use of Health Reimbursement Accounts (HRA) to pay for employer coverage on the individual market is extremely interesting in a wide variety of ways. The basic HRA concept is that the employer would place an age/geography/family size adjusted sum of money into employee accessible accounts. Employees would then use the exchanges to purchase insurance on the individual market. The employer effectively makes explicit healthcare costs and off-loads the expense of administration of healthcare benefits to the exchanges.
This is interesting in a wide variety of ways. We talked about how the current system of requiring the reporting of insurance premiums on income tax W-2s (Box 12-DD) does not make people too sensitive. Right now, at most box 12-DD is an interesting factoid as the sum of money that Duke spends on my health insurance is intermediate through multiple opaque layers of value creation and destruction. I don’t know if other large employers can provide my family with the same or better realized value on health insurance. If I had to shop on the Exchange and Duke offers $12,000 for family coverage and Other Employer offered $10,000 in an HRA for family coverage, I can make a real estimate of the value trade-off. But right now, if Duke holds premiums constant while increasing deductibles, I have a hard time determining if my value proposition and trade-offs have changed.
In 2012, Paul Krugman was banging the drum on downward nominal wage rigidity.
Via Mark Thoma, a new paper from the San Francisco Fed offers stunning evidence on downward nominal wage rigidity, a topic I’ve written about before.
What the paper shows is that many, many workers are getting precisely zero wage growth in dollar terms:
This stuck with me. People don’t like taking nominal pay cuts as their debts are mostly denominated in nominal dollars. Employers don’t want to demoralize their workforce with nominal pay cuts so they cut head count and fringes to reduce costs and then rely on several years of nominal zero percent changes in an inflationary environment to produce real pay cuts.
Health insurance in an employer sponsored world is a major source of potential savings as Box 12-DD numbers aren’t real. Employers could go to a tiered network or higher deductibles or more restrictive plans while still providing something that most of their remaining employees would consider “similiar” enough to a 0% raise. Those moves are invisible or close enough to invisible so that the scream minimization constraint is satisfied. ESI health insurance premiums are very well hidden compensation for employees although it is very clear compensation for employers.
A question that sticks in the back of my policy brain is “What if the 2008/2009 Great Recession happened again?” This question does not dominate my thinking but it gets asked at least a couple of times a year as I think about possibilities.
Moving to an common HRA arrangement for employer sponsored health insurance should make the cost of premiums far more explicit in a repeat version of 2008-2009 employment shocks. An employer who is seeking to cut compensation costs by taking an average of $800 per employee per year out of the health insurance budget can’t do that any more by narrowing the network, restricting the formulary and switching from a PPO to an HMO. Instead it is an explicit cut where the HR rep has to convince the workforce that this year they received on average $10,000 in employer premium support and next year they will receive $9,200 in average premium support and that is still a great deal. And it may be a good deal for individuals who qualify for subsidies as they will get topped up but for folks who don’t qualify for subsidies, this is an explicit wage cut.
The idea of HRA breaking the employer role of selecting health insurance is extremely attractive assuming deep and well functioning individual markets or at least individual markets that are no more dysfunctional than the current large group markets. However, making explicit the cost of health insurance may exacerbate a repeat of 2008-2009.
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 15 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
On The Road and In Your Backyard is a weekday feature spotlighting reader submissions. From the exotic to the familiar, please share your part of the world, whether you’re traveling or just in your locality. Share some photos and a narrative, let us see through your pictures and words. We’re so lucky each and every day to see and appreciate the world around us!
Submissions from commenters are welcome at tools.balloon-juice.com
As promised, a bigger drop of Le Comte’s marvelous Africa pictures. Also today marks history – Nancy Smash, part 2. I fear much about this year but have a lot of faith in her and how she marshals the nuances in the House, Senate, and Presidency to get things done. Let’s hope she can guide us away from ruin.
This memorable Thursday, we pick up this story where we left off on Tuesday, the Kalahari. True fact – I was born in South Africa because my parents lived in Kinshasa and the best medical care around was in Johannesburg. I’ve been there once since, during the height of Apartheid, and it was sobering. I hope to go back and see the land of my birth, hear the sounds my parents played for me as the regaled me with stories of my infancy. and see progress. It’s a different world there, and so much more complicated and brimming -bursting, really – with potential and desire.
We’ll continue with Le Comte’s odyssey next Tuesday. We’ve got something wonderful lined up for Friday, so have a wonderful day and enjoy the pictures!
This post is in: Dolt 45, Open Threads, Republicans in Disarray!, All Too Normal, I Reject Your Reality and Substitute My Own
everyone asking if this is real: YES, YES IT IS https://t.co/V03cVDqdKN
— shauna (@goldengateblond) January 2, 2019
THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES HAD A POSTER OF HIMSELF ON THE CABINET TABLE AND PRAISED RUSSIA FOR INVADING AFGHANISTAN. (We have a serious problem, people!)
— Kelly Magsamen (@kellymagsamen) January 3, 2019
Edith Wilson stepped up after her husband’s stroke, and Nancy Reagan did her best to harry Reagan’s advisors into covering for his decline into Alzheimer’s. But even if Melania cared, can we pretend she has any actual influence over her anchor-husband?
Normalization means seeing the POTUS ramble incoherently on important policy matters, watching the grifter he put in charge of the Department of Justice give a cringeworthy performance during the morning’s televised “dear leader” session, and yet being completely unsurprised.
— Dan Nexon (@dhnexon) January 2, 2019
Acting AG Whitaker kisses up to Trump for staying in DC over holidays: "Sir, Mr President, I will start by highlighting the fact you stayed in DC over the holidays, giving up Christmas w/your family, New Year's w/your family… you have demonstrated your dedication to delivering" pic.twitter.com/9Lo2pMocgN
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 2, 2019
This Trump press conference is like one of those viral videos where the kid in the back seat just got out of the dentist.
— Mig Greengard (@chessninja) January 2, 2019